


three little birds sat on my window

by lazyfish



Series: Genuary 2021 [6]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Implied Polly Hinton/Lance Hunter/Bobbi Morse, birdhouses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:14:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28771437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazyfish/pseuds/lazyfish
Summary: Hunter helps his daughter paint a birdhouse.
Relationships: Robin Hinton & Lance Hunter
Series: Genuary 2021 [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2087955
Comments: 10
Kudos: 16





	three little birds sat on my window

Immovable object: Lance Hunter, warm in bed on a Saturday morning.

Unstoppable force: Robin Hinton, seven-year-old with the most adorable pouting face known to humankind.

“Daddy,” she whined, sticking her bottom lip out. “You promised.”

When Hunter had promised to help Robin make a bird feeder, he was thinking it would be an afternoon project, not one she would wake him up at the crack of dawn for.

“Okay, little bird,” Hunter yawned. “I’m up, I’m up.” A hand shoved at his shoulder, giving Hunter the momentum he needed to half-fall, half-climb out of bed.

“Yay!” Robin skipped out of the bedroom and Hunter gave one last mournful look over his shoulder before following him.

“Do you remember where Mama put it?” Hunter asked, rubbing at his eyes to clear some of the sleep out of them. Robin nodded and scurried off, her bare feet _pit-patting_ against the tile floor as she went looking for the broom closet where they stored extra arts and crafts projects for her. Her search gave Hunter just enough time to begin fixing himself some tea before Robin came back, brandishing the bird feeder proudly.

The feeder Polly had picked out at the store was fairly simple - just a tray for bird seed suspended underneath three small wooden birdhouses. The whole contraption was connected with jute strings and theoretically was eco-friendly, so if anything broke or otherwise became unusable it would just be compostable rather than have to be put into a landfill. Bobbi and Polly had both also insisted on eco-friendly paints for that same reason, which weren’t exactly easy to come by in their daughter’s preferred color palette (also known as _technicolor neon rainbows_ ).

“And what do we have to do to the table before we start opening paints?” Hunter asked, bobbing his tea bag idly.

“Newspapers!” Robin chirped, already elbow-deep in their recycling bin. She picked up a stack of newspapers and plunked them on the table with an over-dramatic groan. 

“Do you want some help there, little bird?” Hunter asked, smirking.

“Maybe,” Robin said sheepishly. 

“How about I do this half of the table, and you do that half?” Hunter asked, leaving his teacup on the counter while he came to his daughter’s rescue.

Robin nodded enthusiastically and began rustling the newspapers loudly. She seemed to be making more noise than progress with covering the table, but the adorable concentrated look on her face was worth it.

“Done!” Robin announced three minutes later when she’d managed to cover most of her section of the table with the newspaper. Hunter had already finished his section, even while sipping his tea, seeing as he was much more coordinated than Robin… most of the time. He added a few more sheets to cover the spots she had missed before moving the feeder from the counter to the center of the table, along with a jar of water for Robin to clean her paint brushes with.

“Alright, birdie. It is time to unleash your creativity,” Hunter said as he began unscrewing the jars of paint for Robin. She grabbed one of the paintbrushes gleefully, and Hunter had to hold her back before she dove headfirst into the paints. “What don’t we touch when we’re painting?”

“Our eyes, our mouth, and…” Robin screwed up her face as she tried to recall the last one.

“Our hair,” Hunter supplied, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “Or Mummy will make you take another bath.”

“But _Daddy_!” Bathtime was Robin’s least favorite time of day, and she wasn’t pleased at the mere suggestion she may have to endure it twice.

“I don’t make the rules in this house, little bird, I just follow them,” Hunter chuckled. “Besides, how would you be getting paint in your hair anyways?”

“I don’t know,” Robin said, dabbing her paintbrush into the red paint pot delicately. “I haven’t seen this before.”

Hunter froze. “What’s that, love?”

“I haven’t seen this before,” Robin repeated, unperturbed. She either didn’t realize how monumentous this was, or was more concerned with painting her birdhouse than she was the fate of the earth. Which was fair, since she was seven.

Hunter resisted the urge to sweep her up into the tightest hug he had ever given. The scariest part about your child being a seer was knowing she would see everything that went wrong. Robin had nightmares of the world splitting in two, nightmares of the people she loved dying, nightmares of a hundred other things someone so young never should have had to bear. He’d stayed up with her through the worst of them, rocked her back to sleep when she was too tired to cry anymore. 

Now… maybe things were changing enough that she wouldn’t have those nightmares. Maybe they’d shoved the world onto a new path, one where she got to be a _child_ instead of an oracle. Hunter didn’t want to hope - Robin didn’t see everything, of course, but it was the first time she’d made a point to tell him she hadn’t seen something before.

“Daddy?” Robin asked.

“Hmm, bird?”

“I asked you whether your house should be yellow or orange,” Robin said with patience uncharacteristic for someone her age.

“I dunno, bird. Is the red house for Mummy or Mama?”

“Mama. Mummy likes yellow, remember?”

“Do you want to have two yellow houses?” Hunter asked.

Robin wrinkled her nose and shook her head. 

“Then I guess my house should be orange, shouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” Robin agreed. 

“What about you, bird? I seem to remember someone’s favorite color is blue.” Robin hadn’t put any blue on any of the houses yet, which was uncharacteristic for her. Even when she used a color palette that looked like unicorn vomit, blue was the primary focus of her work.

“I’ll put the blue on after!” Robin said excitedly. “I’m gonna put green with the red and blue with the orange and purple with the yellow! Mama taught me about colors that are… comememory.”

“Complimentary?” Hunter clarified.

“Yeah!” Robin bounced in her chair, splattering paint off her paintbrush. It was a good thing they had laid down the newspapers, Hunter thought as red droplets continued to spatter everywhere.

“You want to be an artist when you grow up, birdie?”

“I wanna be a spy like you and Mummy,” Robin answered without missing a beat.

Hunter’s heart sunk. “Well, love, I hope that when you’re my age, we don’t need any more spies.”

“What do you mean?” Robin asked, dropping her paintbrush into the water jar.

“We only have spies because people argue a lot,” Hunter said, running his hands absently through Robin’s brunette hair. “And I hope that when you’re older, people won’t argue anymore.”

“That’s not going to happen, Daddy.”

“Vision?” Hunter asked quietly. So much for a better world.

“No,” Robin answered, clambering onto his lap. The red paint she had managed to get on her hands smeared on his pajama shirt, but Hunter didn't care as he cuddled her close.

“Mummy says there’s always going to be bad people. And that being a spy means that you make sure the good guys win even when there are bad guys.”

Hunter sighed. He should’ve known Bobbi would’ve already heard about this dream of Robin’s and given her own opinion on it.

“And what do you think, baby?”

“Dunno.” Robin shrugged. “But I wanna be a spy. And I haven’t seen anything that says I can’t be.”

“Hey, you.” Hunter nudged Robin’s cheek with the tip of his finger until she was looking at him. “No vision ever gets to tell you what you can and can’t be, you understand me?”

“Okay.” Robin rested her forehead against Hunter’s, her hands coming to rest on either side of his face. “I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you, my little bird.” Hunter pressed a kiss to the tip of her nose. “And I bet all the birds in the neighborhood are going to be begging to move into these awesome new houses when you’re done.”

Robin giggled, jumping out of Hunter’s lap so she could return to her painting. He grabbed his tea - double checking that it was in fact tea and not Robin’s paint water, since that was a mistake that he only needed to make once - and took a swig. His daughter was humming happily to herself as the first rays of sunlight began filtering through the kitchen window, and maybe (just maybe) they had changed the future enough that the most worry she would have in the world was whether or not she got to be a spy.

It wasn’t the life he thought he’d have when he and Bobbi agreed to look after Robin and Polly all those years ago - but that was okay, because this life was better. 


End file.
